“I won’t,” I say, but I don’t really mean it. I know I won’t be able to sleep until I talk to my parents, so when all the lights in the apartment go off, I go sit in the farthest corner of the living room and press my knees tight against my chest. With a shaking hand, I lift up my phone and start a FaceTime call with Ma.

It rings for a long time, which makes me wonder if she’ll even pick up. The last place they stayed had terrible Wi-Fi, so sometimes my calls wouldn’t go through.

“Mateo?” Ma says when she finally answers. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. I’ve never called them this late, but tonight there are too many things I have to get off my chest. “I just…”

Pa’s voice interrupts me. “Who is that?” he asks from somewhere in the background.

Ma looks over her shoulder at him. “It’s Mateo.”

“Mateo?” Pa’s face comes into the picture. “How are you, mijo? How was the zoo?”

“It was… weird,” I say, trying to keep my voice as low as possible. I don’t want to wake anyone up. “One second, Sophie was running around, looking at the animals, and the next she was crying because she missed you too much.”

I look away from the screen, not wanting to see the hurt in Ma’s and Pa’s eyes as they hear this.

“Did you try to comfort her?” Ma asks. “Did you tell her that—”

“I tried everything,” I say. “It didn’t work. She kept crying, and all I could think about was what she said this morning—how she wants to go live in Mexico with you.”

There’s a moment of silence. I almost think FaceTime has frozen, but no. Ma and Pa are just standing too still, holding their breath.

I clear my throat. “Don’t you think—”

“No.”

“But what if we—”

“Mateo,” Pa says firmly. “We can’t bring her here. There are some things she can’t understand right now because she’s too young, but one day she’ll see it—she’ll see why staying in New York was the right thing.”

“Is it, though?” I ask, my voice barely there. “Is it the right thing?”

I know we’ve talked about this before, but all of a sudden it’s hard to remember the reasons we thought it made sense for me and Sophie to be here. And if Ma and Pa had seen my sister today—if they’d had to witness all the times she broke down crying, or if they’d had to be the ones trying to convince her that everything’s going to be okay—I’m pretty sure they’d forget about those reasons as well.